Lauren Child

"Child cuts a stylish figure on stage - there's something slightly Jemima Goldsmith about her - but she also has a very child-like manner. As she admits to the audience, there seems to have been some kind of merging with her best-loved character, Clarice Bean. 'I'm becoming more like her, and speaking more like her,' she says. 'I'm finding it harder to form a goodish kind of sentence...' She also explains that in the Bean books she uses Clarice as a mouthpiece for the things she really minds about herself. 'I hate people dropping litter," she says, 'but I'd never dare say anything to a litter bug in the street. So I write about them and Clarice will say something instead. I hide behind her.'"